Abstract
The diversity of wild mushrooms was investigated from two protected forest areas in India and 231 mushroom specimens were morphologically identified. Among them, 76 isolates were screened for their antimicrobial potential against seven bacterial and fungal pathogens. Out of 76 isolates, 45 isolates which displayed significant antimicrobial activities were identified using ITS rRNA gene amplification and subsequently phylogenetically characterized using random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers. Sequencing of the ITS rRNA region classified the isolates into 16 genera belonging to 11 families. In total, 11 RAPD and 10 ISSR primers were selected to evaluate genetic diversity based on their banding profile produced. In total 337 RAPD and 312 ISSR bands were detected, among which percentage of polymorphism ranges from 34.2% to 78.8% and 38.6% to 92.4% by using RAPD and ISSR primers respectively. Unweighted Pair-Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA) trees of selected two methods were structured similarly, grouping the 46 isolates into two clusters which clearly showed a significant genetic distance among the different strains of wild mushroom, with an similarity coefficient ranges from 0.58 to 1.00 and 0.59 to 1.00 with RAPD and ISSR analysis respectively. This reporthas highlighted both DTR and MNP forests provide a habitat for diverse macrofungal species, therefore having the potential to be used for the discovery of antimicrobials. The report has also demonstrated that both RAPD and ISSR could efficiently differentiate wild mushrooms and could thus be considered as efficient markers for surveying genetic diversity. Additionally, selected six wild edible mushroom strains (Schizophyllum commune BPSM01, Panusgiganteus BPSM27, Pleurotussp. BPSM34, Lentinussp. BPSM37, Pleurotusdjamor BPSM41 and Lentinula sp. BPSM45) were analysed for their nutritional (proteins, carbohydrates, fat and ash content), antioxidant potential. The present findings also suggested that the wild edible mushroom strains do not have only nutritional values but also can be used as an accessible source of natural antioxidants.
Highlights
Mushrooms are fleshy fungi and have become attractive as a source for the development of several extracellular enzymes with agricultural and biotechnological significance
Relative abundance of the wild mushrooms was compared between the two selected forests at the genus level (Fig 3) and the result showed that Boletus was the most abundant genus at Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) and Murlen Nation Park (MNP) with 20.16 and 12.1% respectively
MNP is known for its dense forest where only 1% sunlight can directly penetrate the forest on a sunny day
Summary
Mushrooms are fleshy fungi and have become attractive as a source for the development of several extracellular enzymes with agricultural and biotechnological significance. Most of the tribal people in rural areas use wild mushrooms as their mainstay which sometimes leads to fatality due to the lack of knowledge in differentiating between edible and non-edible/poisonous mushrooms [12]. Their ecological influence varies from one to another depends on their lifestyle [13]. We selected two DNA based markers like randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD), and inter-simple sequence repeats (ISSR) to understand the genetic diversity among the wild mushrooms as these marker systems have been routinely employed to assess genetic diversity [19,20]
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